News & Events

As the news media has reported, the Japanese government has declared a “state of emergency” today (April 7, 2020) for 7 designated prefectures including Tokyo, Osaka and their neighboring prefectures in view of the spreading COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the “state of emergency”, the government strongly requests that people stay at home unless for essential tasks such as shopping for food, medical care, or work.  The request is not accompanied with enforcement procedures such as fines against violators.  In addition to the government’s declaration, the city of Tokyo has requested that companies shift to teleworking and that people are to stay away from overcrowded and poorly ventilated spaces where people speak or sing.  We expect that people will take these requests seriously and refrain from going out unless it is really necessary.

Although going out to work is exempted from the government’s requests, our firm started shifting towards teleworking at the beginning of March to reduce the exposure of our people to risky environments and has been trying to solve the inconveniences people encounter in teleworking.  As a result of this process, we have decided to shift to teleworking completely (except for rare situations where working in the office is necessary such as the filing of paper documents in court) and maintain the firm’s functions as usual on that basis.  There will be only a few people in our offices from this week.  However, please be assured that our members are reachable by email as before and our firm is fully functioning despite the “state of emergency.”

We handle German-Japanese and Chinese-Japanese translation, in addition to English-Japanese and Japanese-English, as we have staff experienced in each of these language pairings.

Sonoda & Kobayashi is now the official sponsor of the Tsukuba Conference of 2019.

Tsukuba Conference is designed for young researchers, entrepreneurs and other young experts in various fields to share their ideas to enhance a deeper understanding of the future of science and technology, and on the wide range of challenges and solutions that science and technology can generate in relation to the global society.

By bringing together approximately five hundred future leaders from all over the globe to Tsukuba Science City, Tsukuba Conference will provide them a platform to discuss and debate issues, to put together action plans and proposals in the course of their discussions, and to reach out to the global community.

In particular, this year’s conference is aimed to enrich relevant discussion on “How do science, technology and innovation contribute to achieving Society 5.0 and SDGs”, concerning various topics on health, medical and social systems, as well as contribution by cutting-edge science and technology in the context of Society 5.0 and SDG.

The conference will be held from October 2rd to October 4th at
Tsukuba International Congress Center.

Sonoda & Kobayashi Intellectual Property Law Firm presents our latest webinar, titled ‘Patents: Patentability of Software Invention and AI-Overview of Legal Systems and Recent Trends in Germany, Japan and other European jurisdictions’, in collaboration with the EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk and Murgitroyd’s Munich office.

In this webinar, we will cover:

– The patentability requirements and legal basis for software and AI related inventions in Japan and Europe

– The subject matter eligibility and examination guidelines for such inventions

– Case examples of AI-related inventions in Japan

– The protection of AI-related inventions in European Jurisdictions

Speakers: Dr.sc. Robert Börner (Murgitroyd) and Sarvajit Patil (Sonoda & Kobayashi) Moderator: Luca Escoffier (EU-Japan Technology Transfer Helpdesk)

Organiser: EU-Japan Centre for Industrial Cooperation – Brussels Office

This webinar was held on June 28th, 2018. You can see the video from the following the link here.

We will attend IPBC Global 2019 from June 16^th to June 18^th in Boston, USA.

For more event details, please visit the website.

If you would like to arrange a meeting during the conference, please do not hesitate to contact us at IAD@patents.jp.